One of my first jobs as a junior reporter was to meet flights bringing famous
people to Australia. Growing up in a country far from everywhere (except, as my
father would say, "where you come from"), I was led to believe that Australia's
honor was at risk unless a well-known person from "Over There" said something
flattering about us, preferably the moment they arrived at Sydney airport. There
was a designated list of attributes they could comment on. These were: the
weather, the beaches, the harbor, the harbor bridge, the happy people, the
beer. When an exhausted Elizabeth Taylor stepped off her piston-engined flight
from California and faced the mandatory barrage of questions, she replied:
"Where am I, for Christ's sake?"

This was understandable but ill-advised. Readers of the Australian press were
warned that Taylor and her accompanying husband Mike Todd, the Hollywood
producer, were problem people who did not appreciate their good fortune in being
among us. Todd's "dwarf-like and grizzled" appearance and the size of the bags
under his wife's eyes became the subjects of particular tabloid scorn. Their
stay was brief.

It was the first scheduled jet flight that drew us closer to the rest of
humanity. This momentous occasion gave me my first front page story in the
Sydney Daily Telegraph, which declared solemnly, "A new era in civil
aviation has dawned ..." The inaugural aircraft was a Boeing 707 of the national
airline Qantas, an acronym for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial
Services. Founded in the outback town of Winton, Queensland in 1920, Qantas is
today the world's oldest continuously operating airline and, along with the
great cricketer Don Bradman and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, occupies a place in
the nation's affections. Most important, it is the only major international
airline in the jet age never to have lost an aircraft in a fatal accident.
Perhaps wary of holding such a distinction to fortune, Qantas advertising never
mentions it.

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In recent years, however, the safest airline has had close calls, including
an Airbus A330 that went into a sudden dive in 2008 and injured up to 74 people,
a Boeing 747 engine that blew up after leaving San Francisco in 2010 and a new
A380 whose engine shattered over Singapore later that year. These, and a series
of less serious incidents, have all happened since the airline was taken out of
public ownership and handed to global banks. The largest shareholders include JP Morgan, HSBC and Citicorp, which are also among the top shareholders of
Australia's major banks and largest mining companies. The national airline, like
the Australian economy, is mortgaged: the product of a bi-partisan political
system dominated by rapacious business.

It was an article of faith that the world's only island-continent, flanked by
the two greatest oceans, needed a long-haul airline -- until the asset-strippers
took control. What followed is a cautionary, universal tale. Last October,
without warning, the Qantas Chief executive, Alan Joyce, ordered the grounding
of the airline's global fleet. More than 68,000 passengers were stranded in 22
countries, and the entire Qantas workforce was locked out without pay. Joyce
later admitted that tickets had been "mistakenly" sold for flights that Qantas
management would never take off; the grounding had been planned well in advance.

This unprecedented action was the climax of a plan to crush the unions,
Murdoch-style, and to take much of the company "off-shore" into Asia. A
subsidiary airline based in Asia would employ fewer staff and pay them less,
including pilots and engineers, in conditions once unknown to the world's safest
airline. For a decade, the company has been building wholly or partly owned
domestic and regional airlines on this cut-price basis while closing Qantas
routes.

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The fleet grounding was presented in Australia's mostly Murdoch-owned capital
city press as the inevitable result of an intractable industrial dispute. In
fact, the unions were negotiating with Qantas, and the domestic network was not
in dispute at all -- yet its workforce was also locked out without pay. As if on
cue, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stepped in, using powers under the Labor
government's Thatcher-like industrial laws known as Fair Work Australia (FWA),
which allow employers to lock out their employees without notice and requires
none of the ballots and processes forced on unions.

Gillard ordered an emergency sitting of the FWA arbitration court which
effectively ruled in favor of the company, cancelling the lock-out yet stopping
the workforce from taking action against the coming destruction of their jobs.
The Transport Workers' Union offered only vocal resistance. As in Britain and
America, the unions have long been tamed, co-opted and policed by their own
leaderships. Gillard's workplace relations minister is Bill Shorten, a former
union boss whose political ambitions and boasts of close ties to business elites
are highlighted in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

The day before he announced the grounding and lock-out without pay, Joyce
received a pay rise of 71 percent pay. He now takes home A$5 million a year.
Last year, Qantas recorded a before-tax profit of A$552 million, having doubled
its net profit and increased its revenue. In February, the company announced
that, as a result of a sharp fall in this year's profits -- caused, not
surprisingly, by the grounding of the fleet and the consequential loss of
business -- it planned to cut 2,500 jobs, including maintenance engineers and
pilots.

The catch-22 caused barely a political ripple and Qantas management was
congratulated in the media for its "courageous stand." According to the
Sydney Morning Herald, the loss of revenue is "a case study in
Australia's ability to cope with globalization." In a choice of words Qantas
passengers might find unsettling, the paper said the airline had to "compete or
die."

John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and documentary film-maker. He is one of only two to win British journalism's highest award twice, for his work all over the world. On 1 November, he was awarded (more...)